Neil MacFarquhar, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday

Neil MacFarquhar's 2008 The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East is a fun jaunt through the contemporary Middle East. MacFarquhar grew up in Libya on an Esso oil company compound before Qaddafi and his eccentricities seized power and booted the Americans. After a fairly elite upbringing--attending Deerfield and Stanford--he was an AP and NYT correspondent in the Middle East mastering Arabic and sloshing around the region encountering Islamists, the Ikhwan, mukhabarat, and men and women yearning for reform and openness. The 359 pages of text delve into a host of topics, even though Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and a few other countries are absent from his narrative. Even though it's a mouthful, the title is one of my favorites besides Brad Simpson's Economists with Guns detailing a sordid relationship between Indonesia and US development machinations and experts.

This isn't a conventional scholarly book and, as such, it's difficult to review its chapters apart from their journalistic bent. I'm impressed with MacFarquhar's ability to marry anecdotes and interviews with trenchant criticism. He relegates the bulk of his pique to the repressive regimes in the Middle East and the young leaders whose initial burst of promise faded rapidly and was replaced with the iron fist of the state, even if it was wrapped in a new, softer velvet glove. With contacts across the region, he stocked the book with revelatory chapters that portray a vibrant amalgam of people who seek the chance to provide opportunity to women, poor, and the working-class.

All of this serves another purpose in his epilogue, where he offers policy prescriptions to improve America's poor standing in most Arab speaking countries. Among several meaningful suggestions, one of the most salient is his encouragement for Americans to listen to the people he depicts, for they offer keys to grasping the intricacies of each country's unique challenges and hope for the future. In fact, he rejects the idea that technology's rosy potential isn't the US' greatest trait to share. On the last page he states "I would argue that there is an even more powerful export that has been uniquely American for decades. It is an export that no other country has been able to duplicate, and cheap knock-offs just don't exist. That export is hope" (359). If there was a contest, "hope" could win in spades as the single over-used word in 2008.

As I read the book, my mind drifted to an annoyance I've had with speaking on the contemporary Middle East among scholars, graduate students, or those who shun facile stereotypes. They are gun shy when the question shifts to criticizing Islam, Muslims, or regimes in the Middle East. I'm guilty of hemming and hawing when this topic arises, more often than not in reply to someone who proposes an essentialist vision of Islam as repressive, backwards, totalizing, and ancient. It's difficult to strike a balance when discussions meander toward Islam, terrorism, or foreign policy. Most people can't appreciate nuance, won't commit to understanding the faith, and are willing to generalize when it comes to Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia. The fact of the matter, as MacFarquhar points out, is that some people use Islam to preach a message of intolerance that enables or is manipulated to justify repression. One could easily retort with questions of normative behavior, Western cultural mores, Horky and Adorno, etc. One of MacFarquhar's strengths lies in his even-handed resolution to this dilemma by distancing Islam as the thorn in the side of development or freedom while still pointing out that it can be and is fashioned to oppress. Yet the faith also instills confidence in its adherents that an alternate, equitable vision of the future and society is feasible.

All in all, it's a fun book to read that opens a door to a Middle East that I don't know. Unlike hacks writing on the state of the region and directions for US foreign policy, he speaks Arabic fluently and has a insightful awareness of social and cultural currents across a wide spectrum of countries. There are a couple of chapters that an editor could have eviscerated. Despite its length and few a throw-away chapters, it's an impressive account and worth reading if you're inspired by human rights or desire to grasp the modern Middle East outside of the media drum beat of war, intolerance, and terrorism.